advait's avatar

advait

@advaitarun.bsky.social

187 followers 150 following 151 posts

climate + infra + energy finance @ Center for Public Enterprise ☀️ bay area / dc.

advait's avatar advait @advaitarun.bsky.social
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Thanks always to @goodjillian.bsky.social and Jacob Lambert for the edits and graphic, respectively! :)

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advait's avatar advait @advaitarun.bsky.social
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And this report from CSE India a year ago is chock-full of great insights about how the global financial system exacerbates inaction on climate policy.

www.cseindia.org/beyond-clima...

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advait's avatar advait @advaitarun.bsky.social
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I don't get into detail when fleshing out solutions in this piece, but I know folks who do! This from Manasi Karthik is a good primer on how policymakers can begin to address the debt-climate-nexus alongside economic development.

fpif.org/addressing-t...

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advait's avatar advait @advaitarun.bsky.social
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While I was writing about the debates around the NCQG goal, negotiators were also spending considerable time discussing Article 6―global carbon markets. I didn't focus on this, but it's important!

www.downtoearth.org.in/blog/climate...

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advait's avatar advait @advaitarun.bsky.social
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Shoutout to @joethwaites.bsky.social and Avantika Goswami at CSE India for the useful context on what negotiations looked like. Especially appreciate the resources their teams put together:

1. www.downtoearth.org.in/video/climat...

2. www.nrdc.org/bio/joe-thwa...

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advait's avatar advait @advaitarun.bsky.social
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Last week's UN climate negotiations at Bonn focused on setting a new global climate finance target―but I'm worried that there's no serious plan to achieve it without addressing the global debt crisis.

My latest for @heatmap.news! heatmap.news/economy/cop2...

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advait's avatar advait @advaitarun.bsky.social
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I had a lot of fun writing this, and I'm especially grateful to @goodjillian.bsky.social as always for sticking with this essay for so long and seeing it through multiple drafts!! :)

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advait's avatar advait @advaitarun.bsky.social
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I haven't really seen anything comprehensive about what the IRA does for the *liquidity* of decarbonization investments―so here's me trying to think that through. Beyond muni bonds, I cover mobilizing private capital, market-making, building state capacity. It's all relevant!

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advait's avatar advait @advaitarun.bsky.social
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My latest essay in @heatmap.news evaluating what's good for decarbonization in the Inflation Reduction Act―and how it's hardly enough!!

It's about a lot more than muni bonds, but we do need to fix public debt markets, badly.
heatmap.news/economy/adap...

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Heatmap News's avatar Heatmap News @heatmap.news
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"Cities and states currently get the liquidity they need to fund most of our public infrastructure and services through the American municipal bond market.

Why not use this market to finance decarbonization, too?"

Read more from @advaitarun.bsky.social:

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advait's avatar advait @advaitarun.bsky.social
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i wonder how the rebates/incentives for technology vendors and service providers will pay out, that seems like an interesting governance challenge

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advait's avatar advait @advaitarun.bsky.social
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on first glance @ghgpolicy.org @sevier.io this seems good! lots of ways the proposed authority could mitigate ratepayer bill volatility esp in the face of new investment--very helpful for public power customers

but if i'm missing anything let me know!

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Heatmap News's avatar Heatmap News @heatmap.news
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"None of this is to say that socializing generation and finance solves every problem ... but within the existing structure of energy markets, public ownership does solve a lot."

Read @advaitarun.bsky.social's review of Brett Christophers' the Price is Wrong:

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advait's avatar advait @advaitarun.bsky.social
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My latest for the CPE newsletter, about how the rooftop solar industry is facing down financial distress and predatory lending scandals. Can the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund help fix it? Or do we have the wrong model for financing distributed energy?

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advait's avatar advait @advaitarun.bsky.social
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i assume it's a streetlight effect - they can only use what they know how to measure?

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Brendan P's avatar Brendan P @brendan.bsky.social
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Super interesting white paper. Also this is an extremely grim new metric:

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advait's avatar advait @advaitarun.bsky.social
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it's funny--i think it's really hard for a lot of finance people to do work like this without trying to create metrics/indicators they have value insofar as they cut to the heart of a problem, i guess? small lies in service of a bigger truth?

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advait's avatar advait @advaitarun.bsky.social
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I won't say that the report endorses anything especially progressive, because it's Wall Street, but I'm glad to have gotten the chance to contribute just a tiiiiny bit to some of the forward thinking here.

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advait's avatar advait @advaitarun.bsky.social
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I had the chance to present my research into the global politics of "mobilizing private capital" for decarbonization―the Just Energy Transition Partnerships, MDB reform, etc―to a few different audiences over the past two months.

Here's the slideshow!
tanjasail.wordpress.com/2024/03/25/m...

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advait's avatar advait @advaitarun.bsky.social
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aw thank you so much!! the students asked seriously great questions—i’ve been chewing on them since!

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Madison Condon's avatar Madison Condon @madisoncondon.bsky.social
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So many thanks to @advaitarun.bsky.social for visiting our Climate Risk and Financial Institutions seminar at BU Law today and giving a super fascinating talk on the international climate finance gap

“High level trends: in terms of money, we have no money”

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Michael Hobbes's avatar Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social
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I don't understand why people keep insisting on making this an inter-left squabble rather than unifying around an effective set of policies. We clearly need zoning reform AND rent control AND expansion of public housing. None of the YIMBY orgs oppose this.

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advait's avatar advait @advaitarun.bsky.social
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The book's case studies are stellar (but also I love complexity). But the book doesn't rlly flesh out a framework for govt intervention, so I tried making one myself. I also had some thoughts about uncertainty in the investment process (bad!) and current policymaking (also bad!)

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advait's avatar advait @advaitarun.bsky.social
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I really enjoyed reading Brett Christophers' latest book, The Price is Wrong, about how the private sector won't decarbonize our energy system―it's just too unprofitable!

I wrote down some short thoughts here!

tanjasail.wordpress.com/2024/03/06/t...

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Patrick Bigger's avatar Patrick Bigger @pmbigger.bsky.social
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As governments and multilateral processes fail to slow extinction there's growing interest in how central banks can support biodiversity. Our new book from Third World Network evaluates financial mechanisms for conservation + offers recommendations to central bankers- findings in the 🧵

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Andy Zhang's avatar Andy Zhang @arkbolt.bsky.social
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Looking forward to it. Personally, I don't think we will decarbonize buildings fast enough w/o some entity willing to hold millions of small-home retrofit loans on their balance sheet. On the generation side though, FarmerMac's renewable energy portfolio looks very interesting.

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david i. backer's avatar david i. backer @schooldaves.bsky.social
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Center for Public Enterprise doing the lord’s work explaining underwriting, something I’ve always struggled to fully grasp.

Read the whole piece but stay for this amazing footnote on Musk and Twitter. “Woe is the fate of Morgan Stanley!”

www.publicenterprise.org/blog/underwr...

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advait's avatar advait @advaitarun.bsky.social
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Very excited to have part 3 out later this week.

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advait's avatar advait @advaitarun.bsky.social
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Needless to say, underwriting becomes more complex to execute when projects have novel capital structures, such as tax equity markets for renewables, or are not purely commercial in nature, as with muni bond markets.

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advait's avatar advait @advaitarun.bsky.social
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How does underwriting interact with the broader financial system? For CPE, here's part 2 of 3 in my underwriting series, about why private sector-led underwriting fails to backstop markets for critical decarbonization investments:
www.publicenterprise.org/blog/underwr...

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Yakov Feygin's avatar Yakov Feygin @buddyyakov.bsky.social
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Really happy to have helped with this series. We're going to do a very short introduction to how the monitoring, risk assessment, and dealer functions of banks come together through the process of underwriting and why that matters to decarbonization.

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advait's avatar advait @advaitarun.bsky.social
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Underwriting processes are among the nuts and bolts of the financial system, but they're probably not something most policymakers are paying attention to. We're going to change that! With useful diagrams!

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advait's avatar advait @advaitarun.bsky.social
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Why does decarbonization require building public-sector underwriting capacity?

For CPE, I've written a three-part series about this critical, yet neglected, step in the process of financing energy projects. Here's part 1, about how it works:
www.publicenterprise.org/blog/underwr...

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Yung En Chee's avatar Yung En Chee @yungenchee.bsky.social
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Insurance in a time of #ClimateBreakdown, a lil🧵

From 'Natural Catastrophe Review' we learn that in 2023, global insured losses exceeded $100 billion for the 4th consecutive year, after adjusting for inflation

& (like prev years) there was a gap of >$350 billion (in uninsured losses)

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advait's avatar advait @advaitarun.bsky.social
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renewables, you have to stop. you smoke too little. your cost structure too different. your expected profits are too low. your projects are too risky, they'll kill you renewables jacobin.com/2024/02/gree...

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